10th-Anniversary Sta­dium in Warsaw was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-devastated, and was to pre­serve Communism’s good name for forty years. In the early 1990s it fell into ruin, being ‘revived’ by Viet­namese and Russ­ian traders, pio­neers of cap­i­tal­ism. Since then the Sta­dium and Jar­mark Europa open-​air market sur­round­ing it have become an Asian town, a primeval garden, a realm of dis­count shop­ping, a storehouse of biogra­phies and urban leg­ends, a spontaneous Land-​Art piece or a work camp for archae­ol­o­gists and botanists. The het­ero­topic logic of the place and its long-​standing (non)presence in the middle of Warsaw, he Euro 2012 foot­ball cup, inspired Joanna Warsza’s curated series of live art projects Finis­sage of Sta­dium X  and the related reader, Sta­dium X-A Place That Never Was (edited by Ha!art and Bęc Zmiana Foundation).

A Trip to Asia: An Acoustic Walk Around the Viet­namese Sector of the 10th-Anniversary Sta­dium by Anna Gajew­ska, Joanna Warsza and Ngo Van Tuong (2006), Boniek! A One-man Re-​enactment of the 1982 Poland-​Belgium foot­ball match by Mas­simo Furlan, com­men­tary by Tomasz Zimoch (2007) or Radio Sta­dion Broad­casts by Radio Sim­u­la­tor and back­yardra­dio (2008) were sub­jec­tive excur­sions under­taken by artists into the real­ity of a Stadium ‘no longer extant’. The projects of a participative and semi-​documentary nature touched upon issues of memory, dete­ri­o­ra­tion, or the prob­lem­atic exoti­cism of the place.

The after­noon sem­i­nar at The Build­ing will offer a selection of short, partly per­formed lec­tures mostly by the authors of the reader form­ing a multi-faceted pic­ture of that site’s dete­ri­o­ra­tion, its bizarre exis­tence as a ‘city within a city’ and the artists inter­ven­tions. Con­trib­u­tors are: Anda Rot­ten­berg, cura­tor; Sebas­t­ian Cichocki, cura­tor at Warsaw MOMA; Dr Ste­fanie Peter, anthro­pol­o­gist; Pit Schultz and Diana McCarty, berlin back­yardra­dio; Warren Niesłuchowski, writer and lin­guist, Joanna Warsza, cura­tor of Finis­sage of Sta­dium X and the editor of the book.  

 

Wybrane artykuły i recenzje:

 

Sybille Korte, Katze odel Nudel­mas­chine, "Berliner Zeitung" 23.11.2007

 

Julia Slater, Spread­ing the Swiss Word in East­ern Europe,Turk­ish Weekly, 11.03.2009

 

Daniel Miller, Sta­dium X, Frieze, 15.05.09